Realization:

more decades lived than remain.

Middle age resumes…

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this month-long project of mine. I’m proud of how it turned out and I feel pretty certain that I’ve avoided a vanity project with lots of navel-gazing.

With age comes wisdom. While I’m not the wisest (is anybody?), I am definitely wiser. Writing a little bit every day during my last month as a 50-year-old has helped me look back on my life so far through new lenses, experiences and contexts. My thoughts, reflections and writings have been nostalgic, happy, sad, bemused, certain, uncertain, wistful, celebratory, grateful, literary, individual, familial, cultural, and any number of things.

Off the top of my head, I’ve outlived Elvis Presley, James Dean, Errol Flynn, John Lennon–and, I’m the same age as Revolver, my favorite Beatles album, the one that gets criminally underrated and overshadowed by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band–and Jack Kerouac. I’m wanting to say that I’ve also outlived both seventeenth-century contemporaries Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. (Okay, so I was wrong on both. Shakespeare died at 52, and Cervantes made it to 68. I had to go to Google to check.) Rod Serling, the brilliant creator of The Twilight Zone, missed turning 51 years old by about six months. So, in a sense, I’ve already outlived him.

I think it’s safe to say that being 50 and beginning (and hopefully continuing) the life of a quinquagenarian illustrates two certainties: an increasing awareness of my mortality (ME-mento mori, perhaps?) and a definite appreciation and reaffirmation of just how precious life is and how thankful I am for it, even on the days that don’t go the way I want.

It’s my duty as an individual and a human begin to be as engaged, curious, responsible, personable and creative as I can be, to use the life God has given me. I am always trying.

Thank you, dear readers, however many or few of you may read my writing. You and I are in this (life) together…:-)

Doctor Don

——————–

…a haiku series from my last month as a first-year quinquagenarian.

As with many things in life, this just happened.

I had this grand vision of taking a month-long road trip the year I turned 50 and writing a book about the experience, including thoughts and observations on my life (and life in general) so far.

Well, as John Lennon sang–but didn’t originate–in “Beautiful Boy,” life “is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”  So, no trip and no book (yet).

One night a few weeks ago, I woke up from a recliner nap and boom!  I got an idea.  No rhyme, no reason, it just came to me:  For my last month as a 50-year-old, I would write a haiku each night to capture the experience. 

As the Poetry Foundation reminds us, a haiku is “a Japanese verse form most often composed, in English versions, of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. A haiku often features an image, or a pair of images, meant to depict the essence of a specific moment in time” [my emphasis].